Turnkey Rental Program – At-A-Glance
Electric Utilities today face the challenge of making the transition from a rigidly regulated environment to a marketplace in which they must apply innovative strategies to compete for customers, create new business opportunities, and ensure future profitability.
The Vaughn TurnKey Rental Program is the ideal marketing tool to compete in a deregulated market with a unique, profitable, hassle-free hot water service that customers find extremely attractive and which gives the utility incremental income, off-peak load revenue and long term customer retention.
The core concept is that when a customer's heater fails, they can avoid the high and unexpected upfront cost of purchasing a heater by renting one from the utility.
For a small monthly fee, a heater is installed by a highly-skilled trade ally within hours of the existing heater leaking. From then on, the heater is maintained, serviced, or even replaced of necessary, as long as the customer pays the monthly rental fee. The customer never needs worry about their water heater ever again.
In practice, customers almost never terminate rental agreements, but continue to pay the monthly rental without consideration of switching to gas or other energy providers even if the heater should fail and need to be replaced. Thus, rental water heaters provide a long term service which will prevent a customer from switching to another fuel or energy supplier. How many people will switch if they have to give up their existing heater and then purchase a brand new one?
A rental program provides customers with what they really want:
- hot water now with no upfront cash.
- hot water at the lowest possible cost to own and operate.
- a plentiful supply of hot water at competitive rates.
- peace of mind - if anything ever goes wrong, all they have to do is call and the utility will fix it.
- professional, responsive service staff.
A rental program provides a utility with what it really need
- profitable new business opportunity.
- a steady incremental income stream from water heater rental payments.
- satisfied customers today with long term contracts for tomorrow.
- a way to halt the erosion of water heating market share to gas companies.
- an opportunity to lock in 30% of household energy use.
- a way to build profitable off-peak load and kwh sales.
- flexibility to adjust the program's risk/return ratio to suit your strategy.
- proven program - complete and ready to roll!
The TurnKey Rental Program is simple, flexible, ready to roll, and can be adapted to suit a multitude of utility business strategies. Once the utility marketing goals and objectives have been defined, you choose how much or how little of the program you wish to run. From complete in-house management to complete TurnKey.
Thus the utility can maximize or minimize its level of involvement and balance its risk/return ratio and profitability.
© 2003 Vaughn Corporation
P.O.Box 5431 • 26 Old Elm Street
Salisbury, Massachusetts 01952
tel: 800-282-8446 • fax: 978-462-4683/6497